CHAPTER ONE

HE WAS ASLEEP, BUT WOKE at the sound of the key turning in the lock. The storage room held winter linens, and no one should have been interested in it in the middle of summer, and certainly not in the middle of the night. By the time the door was open, he had slipped through a square hole in the stones of the wall and soundlessly closed the metal door that covered it. He was in the narrow tunnel that connected a stoking room to the hypocaust of a minor audience chamber down the corridor. The door he’d crawled through was intended to allow smoke into the storage room to fumigate the linens. Moving quietly, he inched down the tunnel to the open space of the hypocaust. Squat pillars held the stone floor above him. There wasn’t room to sit up, so he lay on his back and listened to the thumping noises, like drumbeats, as people hurried across the floor of the audience chamber over his head. They could only be looking for him, but he wasn’t particularly worried. He’d hidden before in the spaces under the floors of the palace. His ancestors had used the tunnels of the hypocausts to hide in since the invaders had built them to heat their new buildings hundreds of years earlier.

Noises traveled down the long, narrow tunnel from the stoking room: shuffling thumps and a crackle that he strained his ears to hear. A fire was being lit in the furnace chamber. Soon the warm air and, of more concern to him, the smoke would be fanned into the hypocaust to warm the audience room above and drive the quarry out. Silently, in the pitch-dark, he moved between the brick pillars to a wall and then along it to a flue in the wall with an opening slightly larger than the others. Even with the enlarged opening, it was not an easy task to fit himself into the narrow vent, and while he maneuvered, the warm, smoky air blew around him. He remembered how easily he had slipped into the flue the first time he’d tried it. His grandfather, who’d brought him to the palace, had grown too old and too big for most of the passages and had had to stay at an inn in the town while his grandson explored on his own, finding everything just as he’d heard it described.

Once inside the flue, he wedged his fingers into cracks and braced himself with his feet to climb until the space turned at an angle to join the chimney above the audience room. When he reached the chimney, he cursed silently, though what he found was no more than he should have expected. There was a fire in the hearth below. Fortunately they hadn’t already had a roaring blaze going when they chased him out of the linen room. They must have just lighted the fire, but the air in the chimney was smoky and quickly growing hot. With no other choice, the thief climbed into the chimney and moved up it as quickly as he could, relying on the sound of the fire to cover the sounds his soft boots made on the ridged bricks of the walls. The chimney was much wider than the flue, and the ridged bricks were intended to be climbed easily by sweepers.

He went on until he reached an intersection where several chimneys came together into a much larger one that rose to the roof of the palace. The chimney was warm and filled with smoke, but instead of climbing it, he turned to another opening and climbed down. He guessed that the queen had soldiers posted on the roof of the palace to watch the openings of the chimneys.

He breathed shallowly and slowly, stifling a need to cough. Any sound might betray him. As he dropped lower in the chimney he’d chosen, the smoke grew thicker, his eyes watered, and he missed a handhold and slid down with a thump to a ledge below. He sucked in a lungful of smoke and then covered his mouth with both hands while his face turned red and the blood pounded in his ears. The breath trickled out between his fingers and he breathed in again more cautiously, but his throat burned and his head swam. His breath came and went in huffs of suppressed coughs.

He was on a ledge where the chimney divided into smaller flues that led down to several different rooms. He closed his eyes and listened for sounds, but there was no shouting, only the muted crackling of the fire somewhere below. He poked his head into one chimney after another, debating with himself before choosing one he hoped led to the stateroom of some foreign ambassador too prestigious to be disturbed in the middle of the night by soldiers wanting to light an unnecessary fire in his hearth.

The chimney he chose descended from the main one in a long, shallow slope. Once he was away from the main chimney, the air was free of smoke and he stopped to draw grateful breaths until his head cleared. When he reached the turn where the chimney dropped straight to the hearth below, he paused and settled himself to wait. There was no sign of a fire laid underneath him, so there was no immediate need to get down, and he thought it best to be sure there was no one waiting for him in the room below. After a long silence he heard the creak of a bed as if its occupant had shifted in his sleep.

Still cautious, the thief lowered himself down the chimney until he was just at the upper edge of the fireplace. Then he braced himself across the bricks and lowered his head to glance into the bedroom. It seemed to be empty of guardsmen, and he dropped soundlessly to the hearthstones. The figure he could see stretched out on the bed didn’t move, and the room was otherwise unoccupied. He squatted there in the empty fireplace while he reviewed what he knew of the sleeping arrangements in the palace. He didn’t think there were very many rooms nearby where the soldiers hadn’t already lit fires. They probably hadn’t disturbed the occupant of this room because they were waiting out in the hall for their quarry to open the door and walk into their arms.

He didn’t intend to go through the door to the hall. The bedchamber was on an outside wall of the palace. The wall dropped straight down to a road that separated the palace from the city around it. He stepped past the bed and went to the window and pulled aside the curtains to look down at the perimeter road. He opened the window and glanced up to be sure that no guards on the roof were looking down. He saw no one leaning over the parapet and so swung himself across the windowsill and began to descend. The gaps between the marble facing stones of the palace were narrow, but wide enough for fingers and toes. He was halfway to the ground when there was a shout above him. He had been seen. The thief crabbed sideways along the wall, expecting a crossbow quarrel to bury itself in his shoulder at any moment, but none came. The queen’s personal guard would have guns, he remembered, but no bullets came either. Maybe they didn’t use the guns in the middle of the night, the thief thought. Maybe they didn’t want to wake the queen. That didn’t explain the absence of quarrels, but he had little attention to spare on the puzzle. He’d reached a window, and he swung inside.

He was in an office. Most of the floor where the queen’s taxmen worked would be offices and storage rooms, many of them connected to one another. He’d eluded the guards on the floor above, and if he hurried, he could be gone before they’d reorganized the search. There was little point in trying to hide now that they’d come so close to catching him. He had to get out of the palace and safely into the town.

In the light of the lamps burning in the corridor, he got a good look at himself and winced. Though he was dressed in the household uniform of one of Attolia’s servants, he was filthy, covered in soot and cobwebs, and much too dirty to pass as an innocent inmate of the palace awakened by all the noise. Not that there was any noise. It was a very quiet hunt moving through the corridors of the queen’s palace in Attolia, with her guardsmen creeping quietly, hoping to surprise him, and him creeping even more quietly, hoping to evade them. It was an increasingly frantic game as he found soldiers at every turn. They were in every space he needed to move through until at last they were chasing him at a run, their boots crashing on the bare floors as he forced the lock on a door that led out onto a wall that enclosed one of the palace courtyards.